Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:
Lent is upon us. Pray, fast, and give alms, saith the Lord.
Apropos of fasting, I recently read a food-based memoir that is about very much more than food.
Agata lzabela Brewer, author of “The Hunger Book: A Memoir from Communist Poland” (Mad Creek Books, $24.95), grew up in Lviv during the 1980s with a terrifying, unstable, alcoholic mother and a little brother whom she adored and protected.
READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.
From today’s Magnificat reflection by Servant of God Catherine de Hueck Doherty. The Gospel reading is Matthew 25:31-46–“As you have done to the least of these, so you have done unto me”…
“With him, through him, in him we too can redeem the wrold. Here we make the application: our doing little things well with love–dishwashing, for example–making the connections between our routine daily life and work and the graces it brings to others, perhaps on the other side of the world. It isn’t only death, and the pain leading to death…that we can offer, but our whole life. Put yourself on the paten, so to speak…
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I know I mentioned that in a recent week of house-sitting in LA. one of my chores was feeding and watering three chickens.
I may have also mentioned the conversation that ensued between me and my friend Patrick as I contemplated the prospect.
“Patrick: So will they wake you in the morning with their crowing?
Me: Um…I think that’s guys. Aren’t chickens female? Yeah, they have to be, cause they lay eggs. I don’t think they make noise.
P: But how do they lay eggs without a male?
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“Best Weekly Column on Arts, Culture, Food, and Leisure,” said the Catholic Media Association this year of my humble Angelus offering.
Food! Who knew? Not only had I been derelict in my duty, I realized, but my horizon had considerably widened.
To that end let me bring you to the Irish village of Leenane, and a food truck with a global following: Misunderstood Heron.
“Fresh, Local, Never Conventional” are its watchwords.
A café with wild Atlantic produce and views, the wood-paneled truck sits on a bluff overlooking the Killary Fjord in County Galway’s Connemara coast.
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Ha ha I ACCIDENTALLY (on purpose?) posted the draft of a post yesterday with the definition of “immurement” (walling someone, or more to the point yourself, up in a tiny enclosure till you die of starvation or thirst, undertaken I believe by certain anchorite types in the way olden days, though they would have a little window through which people could pass food and water, and seek spiritual advice), then added, That’s how I feel in Tucson!
I unpublished it right away (I’d meant to make it into something funny down the line), promptly forgot about the whole thing , then received a couple of beautiful messages from friends that made me think, How strange, they are reading my mind about some of the things upon which I’m reflecting here on retreat, and mulling with my director. Then I realized…And now I’ve received a few more emails from commiserating readers, wondering if they missed part of the post…
Anyway, not to worry.
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GRATITUDE
A tempest blew a rainbow in my face
so that I wanted to fall under the rain
to kiss the hands of the old woman to whom I gave my seat
to thank everyone for the fact that they exist
and at times even feel like smiling
I was grateful to young leaves that they were willing
to open up to the sun
to babies that they still
felt like coming into this world
to the old that they heroically
endure until the end
I was full of thanks
like a Sunday alms-box
I would have embraced death
if she’d stopped nearby
Gratitude is a scattered
homeless love
–ANNA KAMIEŃSKA, from Astonishments, Selected Poems, trans. Grażyna Drabik and David Curzon
A little Thanksgiving reflection–
The Italian American Museum of Los Angeles (IAMLA) is located in downtown’s Italian Hall at 644 North Main.
Built in 1908 as a community center, the hall is one of the oldest remaining structures in historic Little Italy and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
I can only speak for myself, but I didn’t even know we had a Little Italy.
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I may have said that I now have Irish citizenship. My paternal grandmother was born and raised in Limavady, Co Derry, Northern Ireland, sailed for America in the early 1900s, married a bricklayer from Glasgow, and settled on the coast of Rye, New Hampshire.
The Irish climate, weather, topography, trees, flora and sky explain a lot of what I’ve observed of the Irish character (not least of all my own). They say that generational trauma extends seven generations, even with no additional trauma, and I’m convinced that I was born with traces of landlord- and famine-fear stamped into my own DNA.
Then again, I have known nothing of real want, material want.
The other day I was out walking, just exploring the lanes that surround the house where I’m staying, and came upon this plaque. There it sat, all by itself: humbly, mute, almost obscured by bracken and fern.
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Wow. Detroit is a city in Michigan as you may know; in fact the largest city in the state.
I’m staying with friends in a downtown-adjacent area called Core City. They bought a house that was in a state of disrepair (though structurally sound) and several years later have created a magical series of spaces that includes not only living quarters and a guest suite but a General Store, Museum, and extensive vegetable, flower and fruit gardens, vine-entwined sitting areas, outdoor sculptural features, Colonial twig trellises, and a pond-in-progress.
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Erin French grew up in the small town of Freedom, Maine, working at her father’s diner. Pressing down grilled cheeses, arranging fries and tartar sauce on clam plates, spooning mashed potatoes and gravy around her father’s famous ketchup-cloaked meat loaf were second nature.
Her father was a hard-driving, hot-tempered alcoholic whose approval she craved and never quite got. But she loved the work anyway: loved the long hours, the jostling camaraderie of the kitchen, the look on people’s faces as they dug into a morning plate of eggs with bacon crisped just so, or a ham and bean lunch special, or a slab of prime rib with green beans for a special occasion dinner.
She never left her hometown where, in a converted hydro-powered grist mill, she now owns and operates a world-famous restaurant and foodie “destination” called The Lost Kitchen.
Finding Freedom: A Cook’s Story Remaking a Life from Scratch (2021) is both a follow-up and a prequel to French’s first book, the recipe-focused The Lost Kitchen (2017).
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“Kneaded: L.A. Bread Stories” is an online project sponsored by the L.A. Museum of Natural History.
Through videos, photographs, and written interviews, the offering celebrates L.A.’s history, heritage, and communities through the lens of bread.
Visually appealing, easy to navigate, the site makes you feel as if you’re walking through a giant strip mall with a fantastic mom-and-pop shop behind every door. The colors, layout, visuals, and excerpted quotes all pop. The mouth waters.
Here are Monica May and Kristen Trattner, co-owners of downtown’s Nickel Diner. In 2008 when the restaurant opened, they had three strikes against them: They were women, they were in Skid Row, and funding was scarce. They forged ahead anyway.
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“Thus is cure a paradox requiring two incommensurables: the moral recognition that these parts of me are burdensome and intolerable and must change, and the loving, laughing acceptance which takes them just as they are, joyfully, forever. One both tries hard and lets go, both judges harshly and joins gladly. Western moralism and Eastern abandon: each holds only one side of the truth.”
–James Hillman, Insearch: Psychology and Religion
I like the quote, but Christ—infinitely wider and deeper than mere “Western moralism” (or “Eastern abandon” for that matter) holds both sides of that truth, and then some. The paradox to which Hillman refers is the intersection of the Cross; the tension of the human condition that Christ, hands and feet nailed, in his love for us holds eternally. As St. Paul captured it so succinctly, “The thing we want to do, we don’t do; the thing we don’t want to do, we do.”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and reading a bit, about our shadow side, as the depth psychologists put it. That if we fail to acknowledge, embrace and love our dark places—we walk around partly unconscious. We tend to be victims. We tend to blame the Other.
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This week’s adventure, or one of them, began last Saturday. I was working in my office when I swore I could hear a weird noise in the kitchen, like when one of the appliances for no reason clears it throat or sneezes.
After going out to investigate, I traced it to the toaster which sits in a corner of the kitchen counter. I tend to be either hypervigilant or hyper-vague and in this instance I decided to go with the vague. Hunh, I thought. Maybe a rogue jolt of electricity has traveled through the cord and has decided to manifest in a faint tap-tap-tap.
Of course I did not actually look into or otherwise investigate the toaster. I “forgot” about it till the next day when I heard an even louder sound and realized there was an animal of some kind IN THE FREAKING TOASTER.
We all know what that means.
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I hope to make a “good Lent” this year. By which I mean I hope to move closer to following Christ’s call to “Stay awake!,” “Store up your treasure in heaven,” and “Pick up your mat and walk.”
Here’s my plan, and I feel quite sure that if I can implement it even in some tiny share, the effects will flow out to areas of my life:
I would like to reform my eating habits.
I’m embarrassed to admit how truly abysmal they are. I eat standing up, hunched over the kitchen counter; or while wandering through the apartment doing ten other things; or bent over my laptop answering emails, reading the paper, watching movies, researching and/or writing.
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